Fortune cookies were invented in San Francisco in the last century. They had their paper--slip "fortunes" inserted by hand and were laboriously formed by hand labor into the familiar fortune cookie shape. In 1963 the first practical apparatus for automatically inserting paper fortunes into fortune cookies and automatically forming them into the fortune cookie shape was introduced by the present inventor, Yau Tak Cheung. U.S. Pat. No. 3,265,016 entitled Fortune Cooky Machine was awarded to Mr. Cheung for this pioneering invention on Aug. 9, 1966.
Since then a number of improvements and alternative apparatuses have been patented, notably U.S. Pat. No. 3,605,642 to R. E. Brown, Fortune Cookie Machine, issued Sept. 20, 1971; U.S. Pat. No. 3,950,123 to E. Louie, Apparatus for Making a Food Product, issued Apr. 13, 1976; and U.S. Pat. No. 3,983,262 to R. H. M. Brunner, et al., Automatic Fortune Cookie Folding Method.
Such apparatus, while a major step forward over hand labor, do not offer the user a great deal of variety in selecting the precise shape of the finished product. Further such apparatus are quite complex and require rapid accelerations and decelerations of various mechanisms including frequent stops and starts of many moving parts. Because of this such apparatus require frequent maintenance and replacement of worn parts.
Also, because of variations in the blank or unfolded food item to be folded, it often happens, with the prior art apparatus, that a portion of the finished products are mishappened and must be rejected.